A Cat Called Cooperative

It was one of those frigid December mornings we’re all familiar with when Basin Electric Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist Darcy Roberts Geffre pulled into the parking lot at Basin Electric’s Headquarters. She hadn’t even parked her car when she saw a furry kitten dart under a vehicle looking for shelter from the zero-degree weather.

“We have a situation,” Roberts Geffre told her coworker, Executive Administrative Assistant Jen Kemmet, when she ran inside the building. Together the two chased the kitten around the parking lot, Roberts Geffre in heels, until he eventually outran them, and the pair couldn’t find him again. But animal-lover Roberts Geffre didn’t give up that easily.

The kitten had run towards Basin Electric’s maintenance shop, so Roberts Geffre called in reinforcements. “We found paw prints in the snow in that area, so we had the maintenance team help set a live trap,” she recalls. “The wet food they used for the trap froze immediately, so Jen brought some kibble from home. We moved the trap a couple times to where we were seeing fresh paw prints, and he was spotted on the security cameras.”

Two days later, the kitten still hadn’t been caught. Kemmet believed it must have a home it returned to, but Roberts Geffre wasn’t convinced and went to check the trap again before leaving work.

“As I sneaked around the generator, I heard something, so I slowly peeked around and saw him in the trap – but the door didn’t close, and he ran when he saw me,” she says.

The weather was forecasted to be well below freezing with life-threatening wind chills that week, and Roberts Geffre says, “I knew if I didn’t save him, he would not survive.”

After her husband, Basin Electric Power Modeling Engineer II Justin Geffre, helped reset the trap, Roberts Geffre went home and converted a basement bathroom into a “kitty rescue station” for when the kitten was hopefully caught.

“Before I went to bed, I set my alarm clock to go off every two hours that night so I could run to Basin and check the trap,” she says. “Justin was not amused by the possibility of my alarm going off every two hours, so before bed he decided to run to Basin one last time to check the trap. He was surprised to see that we actually caught the kitten this time!”

Originally, the couple planned to foster the kitten, but Roberts Geffre says she secretly knew he would end up joining their family.

“One night, he curled up on my chest and fell asleep purring with his head on my shoulder,” she shares. “After that, I had to break the news to Justin that he was staying. It didn’t take long for Justin to get on board because he had already fallen in love with him at this point, too.”

When it came to choosing a name, the two wanted a clever way to link him to the place he was found: Basin Electric. “We thought of Leland, Faraway, Basin, Power, Electra, Windy, and Genny, but chose Cooperative, aka Cooper, because it was easy to say and fit him the best,” Roberts Geffre says.

Fittingly, Cooper’s name is now a reminder of the cooperative spirit that helped save him, proving that small acts of kindness can make a life-changing difference.